This is an AI-generated transcript from auto-generated subtitles for the video Original Love Workshop with Henry Shukman. It likely contains inaccuracies.
The following talk was given by Henry Shukman at the Insight Meditation Center in Redwood City, California. Please visit the website www.audiodharma.org for more information.
Hi Abby, thank you so much. And Rob, thank you very much indeed for the nice introduction and also for inviting me to participate and offer something with the Sati Center. It’s a real delight and honor. I’ve been a kind of long-distance admirer of Gil Fronsdal for a long time. During COVID, there were a couple of periods when I did a lot of those early morning sits on YouTube that he’s still offering, and I absolutely loved them. I loved in particular the dharmettes that he would offer at the end. They were great sits and then great dharmettes. I imagine that a lot of you are familiar with Gil and what he offers.
There was something about the particular path that he’s had, where there was quite a deep immersion in Zen that then moved into a very deep Theravada training of different kinds as well, that really resonated with me. I don’t think I’ve gone quite so deeply into either, but I’ve certainly tried, and I’m feeling more and more called to a somewhat ecumenical approach, if we could call it that, or not quite such a silo-based approach.
The great thing that’s been happening in the dharma in the last 50, 60, 70 years in the West has been this particular thing that I think has never happened before in quite the same way in the history of the dharma, where different dharma traditions are really having to reckon with one another, having to meet one another. There’s been such a strong tradition that if you’re living in rural Japan, and you know there’s a Shinto temple and a Zen temple, and you’re the priest at a Zen temple there, you’re not going to really know about other kinds of Buddhism. You’re just not really going to be exposed to that. You’re going to know this history that your Zen place is directly connected to Shakyamuni Buddha1 2,500 years ago, and there’s a single line of succession that leads from Shakyamuni Buddha to the particular priest that you are in this remote Zen temple. You’ll have no idea really that there are multiple other streams of Buddhism. And it’s sort of not your fault; it’s quite natural. That’s the way most traditions evolve, convinced that they are the one true line. And it’s okay; they may be one very good line, actually.
But many of us now who have been in a deep immersion in a single tradition at some point have to reckon with this marvelous pluralism that must be developing, just even within Buddhism, which is somehow I think inherently well-designed to be pluralistic, actually very open to a breadth of views because it’s such a complex, systems-based approach to existence, really, deep down. So it’s inherently good for pluralism, and Gil is manifesting that in a beautiful way. I’m trying to offer something that is inherently more open to different facets, different sides, different dimensions of practice because basically, we human beings are multifaceted and multi-dimensional, and it’s not likely that one single approach is actually going to meet all our developmental needs. That’s my conviction, and I’m very open to being persuaded otherwise. But for now, that’s the way I see things, and that’s what this approach to original love is really about, and that’s what the book is trying to convey.
So, before I go deeply into what original love is all about, what I mean by that term, and how I see it breaking down, I want to get us into a sit.
But let me just say that I do believe the calling out of compassion, of kindness, of understanding, of empathy, of a more openhearted approach is actually a really important thing at this particular time when, as we all know, the fires of hate—the second poison in Buddhism’s three poisons—are being stoked. Hate has become, or at the very least, highly oppositional positions in the body politic, in social life generally, have become rampant and really fired up. As we all know, in the last decade or two, social media has obviously played its part. Actually, there’s nothing new there. There have been successive waves in human cultural history, particularly European cultural history, where this has happened before. The English Civil War of the 1640s was preceded by the arrival in the UK of small, cheap printing presses, which allowed the printing of pamphlets where anybody could rant and rave about anything, print off hundreds of them, post them everywhere, and get a whole lot of ferment riled up. That led to the upheavals that ultimately caused the civil war.
Then, of course, in the early 20th century, the invention of the radio led to fascism, basically. The possibility of mass media where one belligerent man could speak to millions of people directly through the radio—that hadn’t happened before. And look at what happened in Europe in the 20s, 30s, and 40s. So, something like it is happening again now with social media. All the more reason for us to do our best in our practice, in the incredibly valuable space that all of us here know about, which is a meditative practice, to be actually discovering our own intrinsic capacity for caring and compassion and collaboration. And I would argue, more than that, also our own intrinsic belonging in a wider experience that we’re actually plugged into, of the whole of creation, the whole universe. We’re actually part of it. And to discover that is to discover, among other things, maybe a sense of a kind of boundless love that I think you can see traces of in all the Buddhist traditions that talk about awakening and nondual experience. It’s often not called forth quite as explicitly as I’ve done with this term “original love,” but it’s there. And I believe it’s a good thing to be calling out, especially at this time. Anyway, that’s my little manifesto.
Let’s get settled in for sitting. I’m going to assume that everybody here already has a practice. Is that a fair assumption? I will be offering guidance, so if you’re not in that category, it’ll be okay. I’ll be leading us. We’re going to be primarily still, mostly still for probably 30, maybe 35 minutes. We’ll see how it goes.
So I invite you to get set up how you’d like to be for meditation. And I’m a big fan of comfort, actually, over any notion of a correct posture. I think the correct posture is the comfortable one. So do be comfortable. That does include reclining and lying down if that’s best for you right now. Don’t hesitate. And if you’re getting into the sit and you start to feel, “man, I want to lie down,” I think it’s good to do so, to follow those promptings. Many of us find fatigue in our systems at times when we’re coming into stillness. So, it could well be that the most humane thing you can do would be to lie down and perhaps drift off. And I believe that’s okay. Many of you might know Kelly Boys, a yoga nidra teacher. She and I have taught together, and she really takes people very deep, albeit that it includes dipping in and out of sleep. That’s okay. So, if you do start to feel you need to lie down, please do so.
Meanwhile, I’m going to be offering guidance with the assumption that you’re upright, but just take what parts of it are relevant and helpful for you. So if you’re sitting with your back unsupported, it is really important to be balanced. So either closing the eyes or lowering the gaze, just starting to tune in, to arrive here right where you are, and to be looking for comfortableness, letting this be a safe, comfortable place.
Feel your weight in the seat. Feel those two sitting bones connecting with the support beneath you. See if you can allow your upper body to float above that, so there’s a real deep rootedness in the seat. Somehow that might create a kind of lightness in the upper body and allow the upper body to find its way to a comfortable, effortless uprightness. Sometimes it can be that the more we sense weight in our seat, the easier it is for the upper body almost to float into a natural place of balance.
Just checking, your ears are balanced, jaw is loose. Imagine there were a kind of sling under your jaw and that the jawbone is resting in it, the lower mandible resting in some kind of sling. And you might notice that that invites a softness into the throat and the tongue. At the same time, you might feel that the shoulders are softening, relaxing, and likewise the arms. Kind of letting the arms wilt and letting the fingers be limp.
We can bring some awareness now to the torso, basically the chest and the belly. Just inviting the chest and belly to be loose and open, you know, really kind of almost floppy. Just really let them go, let them be open. And then that can lead us to sensing the gentle expansion and contraction of the breath. So just for a little bit, let’s watch the opening and the diminishing of the breath, a little bit like a kind of soft bellows action. Gentle bellows. You might see if the exhales are ready to be a little bit more like a sigh, a release, just in a small way, as if the exhales just kind of float down by themselves.
Okay, lovely. Now, let’s also be aware of our feet making contact with the floor or ground beneath us. Just feeling the light pressure, perhaps a faint warmth of the contact between feet and floor. And now let’s allow the legs to be limp, soft.
Let’s just see if we’re ready to have a sense of the whole body. The whole body as a kind of approximately egg-shaped energy field, almost like an egg-shaped bubble. So it’s more a sense of the whole energy field of the body, rather than precisely tracking the individual parts of the body. You might quite likely have a faint image in the mind of the body, and if you do, that’s just fine. But see if you can let that body image be sort of enclosed in a kind of approximately egg-shaped bubble. Let’s just see if we can sense a little bit of warmth in that body field, that field of body awareness. Is there some kind of pervasive warmth in it?
It’s fine, by the way, if thoughts bubble up. Just when you notice that’s happened, just acknowledge it. Label it “thinking.” Be happy you’ve noticed, and come back to this resting in a body-wide awareness.
As we’re resting in a body-wide awareness, let’s also sense the gentle to and fro of the breath. Let it be like a little tidal current that flows gently into the body field and then flows gently out of it. You can just rest with the sense of the breath coming and going. Or if you’re curious, you could investigate how far does it seem to stir within the field of the body? How far does it come in, this little tidal current? Can you sense stirrings, perhaps throughout the body? Or at least a little more widely than you might have expected. It may be very subtle, by the way, these subtle tidal movements associated with the breath. Does anything happen, for example, in your forearms or hands when you breathe? However subtle. Can you sense some subtle stirring in the lower legs or feet associated with the coming and going of the breath?
Might there be some subtle stirring throughout the body field associated with the breath, with its soft coming and going? Is there some subtle way that the whole body might be breathing?
As we’re sitting with the whole body and the breath, perhaps the whole body breathing, what would it be like to just drop in a couple of grains of gratitude into the experience? Is it possible to let there be just a little shade of gratitude for this stirring of the breath, for this body breathing? If Guanyin2 or some other icon of compassion were to just let fall a couple of droplets of gratitude into this experience, what would that be like?
Is it possible that somehow there might be a certain tenderness around this breathing body, around this process of breathing, however that might show up for you? Just some kind of softness or tenderness just around this body breathing. It’s not really something to kind of think through; it’s more just, is there somehow a gentleness or a tenderness almost in the very fabric of the experience of this body breathing? It’s not really something we can explain; it’s almost more of a sensory thing in the texture of this experience, this body breathing. It’s perfectly okay if it’s not showing up for you that way. Just be with it the way it is. There’s really no need to do anything here now. Dropping any need to do anything, actually. Just being with what is.
In the last phase of this period of practice, if you’re curious, just see what it’s like to let the range of awareness expand to include the soundscape around you. So there’s still the sense of the body breathing, but actually awareness can also include the kind of wraparound space in which sound arises. No need to do this if you’d rather stay as you are. But either way, really being in a very restful condition where we’re simply receiving whatever is arising in awareness. Resting in, as it were, the full bath of sense experience: body and the breath and the soundscape. Soaking, resting, basking in the whole thing.
We’re going to have a soft, slow closing of this period of meditation. So, by all means, cruise on if you are cruising. Cruise a bit longer if you’d like to. We can also be gently bringing movement back into the body, raising the eyes.
Thank you all very much for coming along for the ride on that sit. I hope you found it interesting and helpful in some way. Now I’m going to dive in and just share a little bit about this concept and approach to practice that I’ve called “original love.”
One of the motivations for that, maybe rather a little grand title, is twofold. One of them is a little bit of a critique of the idea of “original sin.” I think there’s a fairly well-attested generalization that has been made about Western spirituality and Eastern spirituality. The primary model in the West is that we’re messed up and we need to be redeemed. We’ve gone astray and we need to be brought back. We’re fundamentally awry, and an outside force has to intervene and, quote unquote, redeem us.
By contrast, in Asia, the primary model of spirituality seems to be that, no, actually we’re fundamentally great, we’re fundamentally good and right. The problem is that dust and debris and confusions of different kinds have accreted over that fundamental rightness. So it’s interesting to compare those two models. In a way, this declaration “original love” is really just pointing more that way. What if it’s not so much that we need some kind of training to prepare us to receive the beneficent hand of an outside force that will put us to rights? What if the training, in fact, is really more about clearing up the confusions, the three poisons of Buddhism, that confuse us and send us away from what is originally right already within us? And that the practice is about coming back to find an original wellness, an inherent wellness, okay-ness, goodness even, that is already here. And why not call that original love? That’s sort of the idea.
A second origin of this phrase for me personally was in Zen. There’s a lot of talk about “original nature.” It comes up throughout Mahayana Buddhism. There’s a thing called Buddha nature—but it’s not a thing. It is a discovery that we can make that there’s some level or dimension of our very own consciousness that we’re not habituated to seeing or feeling or sensing, but it’s very much here, always here. And when we drop into it, when we discover it, when we awaken to it, what we find is that it’s universal. It’s everywhere. It can’t be absent. It’s without beginning, it’s without end, meaning essentially time is not in its nature. In that awareness, there’s no time. There’s also no space there, no distance. Everything is here. Somehow all things are it, and yet at the same time, it’s not anything because it’s empty, it’s shunyata.3
We can awaken to that original nature. There are some Zen teachings where the terminology is made a bit more poetic, and original nature is called “original face.” There are teaching questions, koans,4 one of which is, “Have you seen your original face?” Actually, the full language of it is, “Have you seen the original face that you’ve had not just since before you were born, but since before even your parents were born?” That’s really just poetic language for, “Hey folks, there’s this Buddha nature, this original nature that you have. Have you discovered it yet?”
Prompted by that, I felt I wanted to use this term “original love” because anytime somebody does glimpse this original nature, it tends to bring up a sense of extraordinary belonging. That I am not the separate entity stalking this earth in its lonely search for what it wants and to avoid what it doesn’t want. I’m not that isolated, separate, constricted, contracted sense of self I’ve felt myself to be. In the moment of awakening to this original nature, I discover that that’s only ever been a very provisional idea, that sense of self. It’s really been no more than a thought or a cluster of thoughts. I have now seen that it wasn’t the totally true thing that it had presented itself as being. Instead, I’m part of something quite different. And I’m not just part of it; deep down, that’s what I actually am. And that discovery, known in Zen as kensho5 or in most Buddhist traditions as awakening, it really overturns, in William James’ language, “the hegemony of the everyday rational self.” It overturns the reign of the separate sense of self. And when we get a glimpse of that, or even more when we really plunge into it, or even more when it becomes perhaps more of a stable way of experiencing this world, there is inevitably some sort of deeper sense of love because of the deep belonging it brings on. Hence, original love.
Now, allow me to say a little bit about the approach that I’m trying to share. It starts with an early Chinese Buddhist document by a guy called Sencho in the sixth century, who said that practice was like a wagon trail with two wheel ruts. He says one of those wheel ruts is the foundations of mindfulness, and the other one he says is “principle,” which is a Daoist and early Chinese Buddhist term for awakening or, as they often called it, “realization.”
The first track is a gradual, progressive, developmental path of practice. One way to come straight at it is by looking at the Satipatthana Sutta,6 the classic foundations of mindfulness sutra: the body, feelings (or vedana, the valence of experience), the mind (which we might understand more like emotional states or moods), and fourthly, dharmas (which in this context seems to mean some of the primary foundational teachings that categorize experience). You can bring those into your practice as lenses for understanding experience. All of that is somewhat sequential, programmatic, and it develops over time. It is a form of training that takes time and practice, and you can get better at it. You can also go deeper and deeper into it. You start analyzing little packets of experience more and more finely, and your general experience of any moment becomes increasingly acute and fine-grained. This brings with it an unpacking, an analysis, a breaking down of the great clump called “me and my life.” You gradually discover it’s made of multiple threads, like a tapestry. As you break things down, you tend to open up more and more. This sense of being locked into a way of being, the single contracted self, is precisely what is gradually getting unlocked and unraveled.
So that’s all great. Why is there another wheel rut? The reason is this great discovery of early Buddhism, later Buddhism, Daoism, Advaita Vedanta,7 and yogic thought: the sudden thing called “realization,” which is not dependent on any of the stuff in the first wheel rut. It’s a flash of discovery that I have never been the separate self I thought I was. It’s not a gradual deconstructing of the self; it’s a sudden, radical seeing through of the whole way I’ve constructed self and world. The great thing about this is that it’s real, it happens, and it does actually reveal something very profoundly important about the nature of our experience. People do sometimes get struck by revelations, epiphanies, awakenings. Sometimes the interpretations put on these can range wildly, but fundamentally, they are simply insights into the nature of the sense of self and its relationship to the world.
Buddhism seems to have known about this all along. There are stories in Theravada of people who come to the Buddha, hear just a snippet of his teaching, and boom, they get it. They see “the deathless.” Maybe in a more secular understanding, they discover this original nature that doesn’t do time. They suddenly discover a level of awareness where the construction of a sense of time is not going on, nor is the construction of a sense of self, nor is the construction of a world that is not self. Some in Advaita Vedanta call it “pure consciousness.”
There’s a great Upanishad,8 I think it’s the Chandogya, where it lays out very clearly there are four consciousnesses: waking consciousness, dreaming consciousness, and sleeping consciousness. But what about this fourth one? The fourth one, Turiya,9 is what all three are made of. The goal of yogic training in this view is to discover the fourth one because then you see what the entirety of your experience has actually been all along. It’s been this unnoticed fourth consciousness.
So that’s why there’s a second wheel rut. From the perspective of the second wheel rut, everything you’re doing on that first one is, maybe it’s helpful, but in a certain way, it’s kind of a waste of time because every little last part of the first wheel is actually already the second wheel, and you just have to realize that.
There are a couple of pitfalls in all of this. The first one is that you could spend a lot of time trying to perfect your practice on the first wheel and not actually recognize that there is a much larger vista here all along. There might be a law of diminishing returns with too much attempt to perfect practice on the first wheel. Loch Kelly,10 in his book Effortless Mindfulness, talks about this. He mentions “spiritual bypassing,” a term coined by John Wellwood for people throwing themselves into practice hoping it would solve other life problems, when in fact they were just avoiding them. But Loch Kelly also talks about what he calls “underpassing,” where we get so into our therapeutic approach to things that we’re not opening up to the spiritual side, or “conceptual overpassing,” where we get so good at understanding things that we’re not actually able to drop down into the experience of them. The hazard of the first wheel rut is a kind of “mindfulness underpassing.” We’re playing whack-a-mole, trying to catch every time we’re off track with our mindfulness, and we might be missing the bigger picture.
The hazard of the second wheel rut is that some traditions, some forms of Zen and Advaita Vedanta, put a lot of emphasis on the big awakening. “Don’t bother with that stuff, just discover who you really are.” The problem with this is, firstly, you’re trying to get something, which is antithetical to the true nature of practice, which is always showing up for what is. Secondly, there’s the idea that if you have seen this thing, you’re done. That’s a grievously hazardous position to be in for a practitioner. “I’m now done.” That’s a risky place to be. It leads to all kinds of problems in spiritual centers where there’s a prevailing ideology like that.
So, I present in this book that you’ve got to have an awareness of both wheel ruts. It’s good to know about both. It’s good to be open to the second, yes. And it’s most important to practice the first.
I wanted to address a question that came in just before the break. Somebody said, “Would you say that there can also be sudden awakenings within the gradual path? I’ve had experiences of profound insights into anatta11 (no self) in the middle of a month-long Vipassana12 retreat that were so clear and sudden that I felt there had been an earthquake.”
Exactly. I think that’s exactly right. The challenging side of realization, the second wheel, is that it’s unconditional. It’s always here. So people can have experiences of it without any practice, while unloading the supermarket shopping in their kitchen. The only thing we can say is what Robert Aitken Roshi said: “Enlightenment is an accident. Practice can make us accident-prone.”
Here’s what I am sure of: anybody who does have a sudden experience of realization, if they don’t have a practice going, if they haven’t already developed a practice integrated into their life, it’s quite unlikely that that awakening will inform their life going forward. I think in so far as the second wheel rut is not dependent on the first, it is dependent on the first if it’s to inform life in a new way after it’s happened.
If we want to have any hope of actually learning to live from the wider experience of original nature, we’ve got to have a path of training and practice represented by that first wheel rut. I feel that every time we get a little new understanding of what it is to really be mindful, there is some kind of little opening that does have a flavor of what I call “original love” in it. Even tiny little shifts where I just recognize, “Hey, wow, that was a long train of thought I was just on,” that is actually just a little moment of recognizing there’s more to this world than I think there is. It’s some little moment of surrender.
I feel that there’s always some little trace of a larger love in all our miniature mini-breakthroughs. And I think that’s really important. If we’re really getting our mindfulness practice and we are finding ways that we can be kinder with ourselves, kinder with those around us, developing more compassion, and feeling more okay, that may be enough. In other words, being all-in on the path of realization can occlude very important little shifts by which we open up to greater okay-ness, becoming a little bit wiser, a little bit happier, a little bit kinder. That’s not dependent on great awakenings.
Let’s now have a little bit of quiet time again. I’ll do a probably 15 to 20-minute sit. I think we’re going to go to a little bit more of a Zen flavor in this sit. I might bring in a very, very simple Zen phrase, but no need to be alarmed about that. It’s going to be very straightforward.
Let’s get set up for practice. Establish your body the way you want to for practice, anywhere from horizontal to vertical. And if it’s vertical, let it really be balanced. If your spine is not supported, let’s now close the eyes or lower the gaze and, with very gentle micro-movements, just rock a tiniest bit forward and then backward. As you’re doing that, feel those sitting bones, almost like they’re kind of drilling down into the earth a little bit. We’re looking for the zone of balance. It’s probably not an exact point, but a sort of general area in the middle where we can stay upright without any holding.
We want the shoulders over the hips and the ears over the shoulders. Let that jaw relax as we did before. Let the jaw kind of sink into the throat a little bit, letting there be a softness in the throat and a slight, relaxed lengthening of the back of the neck. Imagine a little thread just behind the crown of the head, gently hoisting us up just a tiny bit. The jaw hanging, the tongue fully relaxed, throat soft. Shoulders, arms, hands slack. Rib cage hanging like an upside-down basket. Belly and lower spine loose. Hips, legs, feet also loose, dangling almost.
Starting to be aware, arriving here. Aware of the body, aware of the space around us, aware of the soundscape. There may be some intermittent sounds, and there will likely be background sounds as well, continuous sounds. Listen in. Are there, so to speak, strata of continuous sound? Maybe there’s traffic in the distance, or a wind through trees, or some sounds in the building, or some kind of hiss or soft roar or hum in the inner ear.
So, here’s this person doing this activity called meditating. What they’re actually doing right now is listening and hearing these phenomena known as sounds. This person hearing these sounds.
What is this? Who is this?
What is this? What’s going on here? What is this?
Don’t try to figure anything out. Just bringing in a curious attitude to this experience. What is this? What is it to hear a sound?
Who is it that hears? Who is it? Who really is it that hears?
Who is it?
It’s actually an old Zen question, a koan. Who is it?
There are sounds. There’s the hearing of sounds. And there’s the hearer of sounds. Who is that hearer? Who is it?
Let’s gently be bringing a little movement back into the body. If you’re having a particularly interesting time, by all means, carry on. But for most of us, let’s be winding our way out of the sit. Thank you very much, everybody, for your practice just now.
(The group moves into a Q&A session after breakout rooms.)
Question on Self-Criticism: A participant asked about addressing powerful self-criticism in life and meditation practice.
Henry Shukman: It’s a very common thing, alas. We have these active inner critics, and if only they were constructive. Often, they’re just relentlessly self-attacking. There are multiple strands of approach. On the meditative side, what I’ve found particularly helpful is just calling it out. I personally use a lot of labeling practice so that I can actually identify what’s going on.
First of all, thinking is happening. If there is self-criticism going on, it’s happening in the realm of thought. I’d also want to be seeing if I can actually hear the words, the speech in my mind. I find that very helpful. So I use the label “talk” quite a bit. It’s describing the actual phenomenon. If that’s not helping, I might want to get a little bit more accurate and say, “critical talk is happening,” or “judgment is happening.”
The more accurately we can recognize what’s going on as a phenomenon, as an experience… that would include the emotional aspect of it. I would approach that in a slightly different way. I would want to be aware that there’s talk happening in the mind. Then I want to know what’s going on in my chest area, my diaphragm area. Can I feel some sensation associated with emotion? On that level, I actually want to just recognize the sensation and not put an overarching label on it like “attack” or “self-harm.” I really want to know what I’m actually feeling by way of sensation: tightness, density, something contracted. I want to locate it in my body.
Here’s the tricky but helpful part: if I can just recognize it’s there and basically allow it. I’m probably going to be resisting it a whole lot. The great thing with the switch to sensation is that it tends to actually quiet the talk down. So I want to know, what does resistance feel like?
Question on Gratitude: A participant shared a struggle with the idea of gratitude for existential things (like having a home or being able to breathe) because it immediately brings to mind all the people who don’t have those things, leading to feelings of injustice. He found it more skillful to reframe it as “pleasure,” “appreciation,” or “enjoyment.”
Henry Shukman: That sounds to me very skillful on your part. I can understand that, and it makes sense to me. I don’t see any problem with that whatsoever. A lot of the practices around affective states like gratitude, metta (loving-kindness), or compassion are about feeling the wholesome condition. Appreciation is great; it’s really another form of gratitude.
It sounded like you were naturally going to compassion when you were thinking of the other people who don’t have this. That’s a compassionate response. Compassion can have a righteous anger, in a good way, a healthy energy of wishing to redress wrongs in the world. That’s a facet of compassion. So I think what you’re doing sounds just spot on to me.
Question on Psychological Insight: A participant asked about the role of psychological insight in developing along the path.
Henry Shukman: If I look at myself and my own path, it’s been absolutely crucial to me. I’ve had various kinds of psychotherapeutic support over the years. I almost see this as another way of looking at the two wheel ruts. Having a meditation practice, for me, has been greatly assisted by also having a psychological or psychotherapeutic path, at least at times. I think they work very well together.
If somebody’s in therapy, it might be great that they’re also having a meditation practice because meditation can be this baseline that we come back to that just gives us more space, which can make psychotherapy happen more fruitfully. Conversely, I’ve found that at certain times when my practice has been continuing but I haven’t felt so much development, some psychotherapy has been incredibly helpful for unlocking things.
Sharing on Letting Go: A participant shared a recent shift in his practice, moving away from a lifetime belief that his strength and resilience were in contraction and holding onto resentments. He described a “rewriting of the script,” involving forgiveness for himself and others (like a brother he’d disliked for years), realizing their shared humanity and suffering.
Henry Shukman: That sounds very wise to me. I like the sense that you’re questioning whether that contraction is actually really the source of your strength and resilience. I couldn’t agree more. The softening and the opening and the letting go of such a tight hold on our views and opinions and judgments is absolutely great. Forgiveness of self, forgiveness of others can flood in, and we can see this heritage of ancestral ways of doing things and of trauma. Lovely. Thank you for sharing that.
Shakyamuni Buddha: The historical Buddha, Siddhartha Gautama, who lived in the 5th century BCE. “Shakyamuni” means “Sage of the Shakya clan.” ↩
Guanyin: A bodhisattva associated with compassion as venerated by East Asian Buddhists. ↩
Shunyata: (Sanskrit) Often translated as “emptiness” or “voidness.” A key concept in Mahayana Buddhism, it refers to the idea that all phenomena are empty of intrinsic existence or a separate self. ↩
Koan: A paradoxical anecdote or riddle, used in Zen Buddhism to demonstrate the inadequacy of logical reasoning and to provoke enlightenment. ↩
Kensho: (Japanese) A Zen term for an initial insight or awakening, but not full Buddhahood. It is often translated as “seeing one’s true nature.” ↩
Satipatthana Sutta: A key discourse from the Pali Canon that is the foundation for many modern mindfulness practices. It outlines the Four Foundations of Mindfulness: contemplation of the body, feelings, mind, and dharmas. ↩
Advaita Vedanta: A school of Hindu philosophy and spiritual practice. The term “Advaita” refers to the idea that the true self, Atman, is the same as the highest reality, Brahman. ↩
Upanishads: A collection of late Vedic Sanskrit texts that form the basis of Hindu philosophy. ↩
Turiya: (Sanskrit) A state of pure consciousness, or the “fourth” state, that underlies and transcends the three common states of consciousness: waking, dreaming, and deep sleep. ↩
Loch Kelly: A contemporary meditation teacher and author who integrates insights from modern psychology and neuroscience with traditional Buddhist practices. ↩
Anatta: (Pali) The doctrine of “no-self” – that there is no unchanging, permanent self, soul, or essence in living beings. ↩
Vipassana: (Pali) A Buddhist term often translated as “insight.” It is a form of meditation that involves seeing things as they really are. ↩